Saturday, October 25, 2008

It turns out, the more hate I dished out, the less I had to hate on. Lusers keep making the same damn mistakes. These days, I wonder if they're not producing yet another 10-reasons-why-Linux-is-better article just to rope me along.

Let's just say, eventually, one moves beyond anger. Like the five phases of grief, or something. Eventually you get to acceptance. Accepting that lusers are going to continue in their freetarded ways whatever you do, however much you try to embarass them in a public forum.

So in true open source fashion, as the maintainer of this project, I am going to arbitrarily drop off the face off the of this earth for purely selfish reasons, and leave the entire cause in limbo. That is how open source projects truly die. But hey, all the material is out there for y'all to see (it's "open source" in it's own way), so maybe someone else will take up the cause. Carry on, lusers!

Im sure everyone reading this is aware of that feeling when you go and use a friends brand new $2000 Windows Vista computer. The way it runs so slowly with 2GHz of processing power at its disposal, crashes all the time and takes 6 minutes to turn on. It is brand new FFS. When I am in that situation it makes me feel like the entire engineering profession has failed me.

I got that feeling with Ubuntu this week.

Timothy Prickett Morgan at the Register writes about how Linux is what Windows wanted to be. Yes, an OS that supports a bazillion hardware platforms but has barely any useful applications. That's exactly what Windows wanted to be.

If possible, larger corporations that have open source components should do what they can to leave them alone and impose the very minimum amount of bureaucratic overhead on those teams. Results matter far more than process.

Mr. Toponce, once again, from Planet Ubuntu, talking about how Wikimedia has moved to Ubuntu. In the process, he points all the shortcomings of Fedora, for example "Fedora, although it strives for stability, never really gets that opportunity. Instead, each release is broken somehow, someway" or "Fedora places itself to be a test bed for new technologies and changes". Umm yea. Because every Ubuntu release is perfect, and Ubuntu doesn't ship bleeding edge stuff like Pulse Audio in a LTS release.. oh wait..

Don't you love it when open source folks fight among each other? I thought this whole thing was about cooperation.

A blog post suggesting that making your software free is a good approach amidst this global credit crisis. Right, because if you "Sell customers what they need, in their eyes its _just_ the right amount of support. Often this will exceed or equal the amount that you’d gain via licensing." And yea, when exactly are they going to buy this support? Like as a contract? Up front? So you're charging them more? And that's supposed to be attractive to them?

Thursday, October 2, 2008

I was saving this one until this article became free on LWN.net. It's awesomeness is truly unparalleled.

Let me attempt to summarize.

A) PulseAudio needs to work with existing applications, so it implements an ALSA emulation layer, except, it's not complete. Only 70% of ALSA applications work. So it's like, totally ready.

B) So, in the true open source fashion, you should port your app to be a native PulseAudio client. Except that you can't. There's this yet-another-audio-library called libsidney, but it's not ready yet. (Hmm, this sounds familiar...)

C) Fedora led the way in incorporating PulseAudio before it was ready, breaking audio for thousands of users. Then because open source is about copying good ideas and bad ones, a ton of other distros adopted it as well. Amazing guys. In a way, you've spread bad code that breaks audio on thousands of computers faster than a virus could have. And it's immune to antivirus!

D) so now that we're in this "mess" (as the lead developer of PulseAudio calls it*), LSB comes along and says "we're going to standardize how your write audio apps!" Oh, but wait, ALSA's now "old" (we hardly knew ye), and I can't directly program PulseAudio. Hmm... So the article's brilliant solution? Standardize on the PulseAudio-safe subset of ALSA.

WHAT THE FUCK.

I can just imagine the future alsa man page. A big listing of functions, with a nice little asterisk next to those functions that you shouldn't use unless you want your app to totally FAIL on a system which has been sodomized by Pulse Audio. I can just see the developers of commercial Linux sound apps (all three of them) jumping for joy.

And thus unfolds another chapter in long history of failed sound systems on Linux. Can they make it much worse? I, for one, am excited to see how much worse they can make it until we all go back to listening to square waves on our PC speakers.

* BTW, also notice that it's the PulseAudio guy calling Linux audio a mess. Did he forget that it was his project that took the existing mess, and unloaded a giant steaming turd on it? Congratufuckinglations. You've just made it worse. You're a truly a worthy OSS contributor.